What emerged was several things simultaneously—both mood piece and narrative, a lesson in sonic experimentation and taut linear pull—and felt every bit the sound of a songwriter who had come to transcend the lingering weight of his influences to create something truly his own. An achievement made possible not least thanks to Birnbaum’s trust in his collaborators, and in turn the trust he’d earned from them. As we continued:

The result, made possible by both a band now experienced in working together and a label in Western Vinyl willing to trust them, swaps the sleek psych and goodtime rock sensibilities of its predecessor for something altogether more stark and lonely, less a house party than a late-night wander through unfamiliar streets. Which is not to suggest minimalism, the sound owing much to experimental and alt-jazz forebears, but rather the presiding mood. One indebted to the shadow and subtle desperation of noir cinema, the perfect soundtrack as Birnbaum’s worldweary narrator flits between bars and hospital rooms while nursing concerns both trivial and existential.

Fast forward a year and Birnbaum and co. are preparing to release Smoking the Bunny, the second part of the trilogy which picks up where its predecessor left off and follows its protagonist into the darkest depths of the night. After the trials and tribulations of The Streets Like Beds Still Warm, you might be unsurprised to hear the next leg of the character’s journey descends into the near total abyss of inebriation, the city reduced to an illogical maze as he stumbles lost between (and occasionally even within) hotel rooms with the kind of abstract purpose only a drunk man might possess. Because far from a blacked out void, his experience of the night is actually something like consciousness expanded, his state upending the normal flow of time so that memories and future hopes are shuffled into the deck of the present.

In this way, Smoking the Bunny feels very much a middle part, embodying a neither here nor there sensation, looking forward and back simultaneously. A metaphysical midlife record where time feels maddeningly finite, where every hope is matched by an attendant regret, and desires are still present yet shadowed by their own failure to precipitate. “I see it as an inevitable correction for the infinity that is a part of young life,” Birnbaum explains of the mood. “One can’t be disappointed without having first hoped for everything.” The juxtaposition between the fragmentary and the linear is central to this atmosphere, the protagonist subject to two streams of experience just like everyone else. The rude pull of mortal time and an endless mosaic of memory.

The effect was in part achieved by the very structure of the recording process. Birnbaum and his wide cast of supporting musicians started with improvisational sessions which were then honed and curated. Core members Nick Jost, Sean Mullins and Adam Brisbin returned, as did long-term partner Katie Von Schleicher, alongside guest turns from Chuck Johnson, Joseph Shabason, Cole Kamen-Green, Kitba (bec el-saleh), Will Shore, Levy Lorenzo and Macie Stewart, collaborators who worked across multiple sessions to not so much create the songs themselves as the clay from which they would be moulded. And mould Birnbaum did, taking this plethora of (semi)raw material and retreating to solitude in order to cut, shape and reassemble with an array of tape machines, pedals and computers. A method strangely reflective of the headspace of his protagonist, where an ostensible patchwork of moods and past experience swirl into a unified, urgent whole.

Latest single ‘Dim Bars, Delusions of Grandeur (Room 17)’ and its instrumental b-side ‘Lone Firefly Over the Domino Game’ show both how sonically varied and thematically coherent the resulting record proves to be. Each track is very different yet dialled into the same beguilingly ambiguous mood. Take the former, a song elevated by Chuck Johnson’s pedal steel which glimmers like some burnished object glimpsed in low light, or the slightly ominous latter which plays with the unnerving dazzle of some fairground attraction cranked in an empty lot. The deranged depths of night, suggests Smoking the Bunny, surely hold their fair share of doom and regret, yet there is magic to be found there too. Even if it only even glitters at the edges of vision, and will inevitably collapse into unreliable snatches of memory should dawn finally break.

Smoking the Bunny will be released on the 6th November via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it from the Wilder Maker Bandcamp page.

Photo by Keegan Grandbois, cover art by Gabriel Birnbaum

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